Transcript
We're very grateful to Bill, isn't it, for, well, if I could just pull together a little bit what I said this morning and then we'll sit back and discuss, obviously, we are now looking at a situation where the ways of talking about mission and missions that have been characteristic of the last 200 years are no longer applicable. I finished by just in a very slapdash way giving a kind of one-sentence characterization of different regions of
the globe. If one pulls this together, one can state, I think, four common features that are relevant to the whole situation. The first is the political, economic, and technical unification of the globe, not in the sense that we have become more reconciled to each other, but in the sense that we are more involved with each other than at any previous time in history, that our economic and technical processes are such as to involve us with each
other so that we have this concept of the global village, which is, I think, a vivid way of describing our present situation. The second is the enormous mixing of populations which is going on all over the world at the present time, so that, for example, if I may take my own city where I live in Birmingham, there are many of the state schools in Birmingham where 70% of the children are Muslims or Hindus, which would
have been unthinkable 10 or 15 years ago because of the fantastic, and in Germany, immense numbers of Muslims living in Germany as workers, the enormous influx of Southern Europeans and North Africans into France and so forth. Thirdly, the fact that there are really two confident and militant missionary faiths in the world today. One is Islam, and the other is Marxism, both of them rooted in the biblical story in different ways. Neither of them very much interested
in dialogue, both of them confident in their universal mission, Islam and Marxism. And fourthly, the fourth new element in the situation is the fact that Christianity is now a universally dispersed minority religion, a universally dispersed minority religion, no longer primarily identified with Western power. In other words, if one could speak of any one continent as being a Christian continent today, it would have to be Africa, although one could only do that, of course, with reservations. In
other words, that Christianity is no longer primarily the religion of the Western, of the North Atlantic world, shall we call it. So that the issue that we are looking at now in these lectures is how in this new situation do we conceive of the Christian world mission. The forms, the ways of thinking, the ways of acting that have been developed in the past 250 years, the period of Western colonial power, are no longer appropriate. And let
me say, I mean, I'm not just talking about what we call foreign missions, I'm talking about the whole missionary outreach, the concept of mission as being something from the strong to the weak, if you know what I mean, which is characteristic. When you talk about missions, in most people's hearing, they immediately understand that you are talking about something directed to the weak, to the poor, to the backward, to the disadvantaged, to the sick, to the illiterate,
what have you. This whole picture of what is meant by the word mission has been deeply shaped by the colonial experience of the past 250 years. So that, I remember one spending a day with a group of people in Samoa, in the Southern Pacific. Now as you know, Samoa has a fantastic missionary record. Samoan churches have sent missionaries into every corner of the South Pacific. They've got a stronger missionary record than any other church in Christendom,
I guess. And I remember sitting with a group of them and saying, now what is your missionary job now? Now that practically speaking, all the islands of the South Pacific are Christianized, what is your missionary task now? And they began talking about some of the very primitive, unreached tribes in the highlands of New Guinea, which are still un-evangelized. And I said to them, what about the American tourists in Tahiti? This was just totally outside of
the picture. I mean, you don't use the word missions for that. It's, missions is something directed to the backward, to the disadvantaged, to the illiterate, to the people who are. And I remember another very similar illustration in the, it happened that the synod of the Church of South India was meeting just at the time when the Indian tanks rolled into Bangladesh and liberated Bangladesh from power of Pakistan. And one of our bishops, one of our Indian
bishops got up and made an emotional speech calling for a mission to Bangladesh. Now some of us pleaded that there is already a church in Bangladesh. Shouldn't we consult the church in Bangladesh and find out whether they want a mission? But no. The instinct, you see, the instinct, when something is opened up, you see, the Indian tanks have moved in. Bangladesh is now open. Let us send a mission. It was an illustration again of the profound
tie-up between missions and the underprivileged, the weak, those who are, those who are, so to speak, in a position where they can't answer back, where therefore you can speak without being contradicted. And I think that this applies equally to those of you who are concerned with mission in your own community, in your own town. Am I wrong if I say that all of our thinking about mission has been distorted by this experience of the colonial
period when we think of it as something directed to the weak, to the poor, to the illiterate and so forth. And therefore I think that we are at a point where the New Testament speaks much more directly to our situation than does the recent history of missions. Because in the New Testament we are dealing with the expansion of the church, not from a power base, but from a base of weakness. St. Paul, I think that's a
very significant little phrase in the first chapter of Romans when Paul says, I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of salvation, both to the Jew and to the Greek. I imagine Paul faltering for a moment as he thinks of the great, confident, wealthy, dominant power of Rome, the center of the world, the center of the power structure that rules the world. And Paul, coming from the periphery of that world with none
of the power that modern missions have had, none of the cultural, political, economic, intellectual powers, coming from weakness as it were. I can imagine Paul sort of faltering for a moment as he asks himself how this message of a crucified Messiah is going to sound in the forum of Rome where the great ones of the earth are strolling around and exercising their power. But this New Testament situation where mission is not from strength to weakness, but
from weakness to strength, I think probably speaks much more directly to our situation. And therefore, this is why I want in this course to go back to the New Testament itself and look at the absolutely basic roots of the Christian mission, at the authority of the Christian mission in such a way as will be relevant, whether we are talking about mission in New Guinea or in South India or whether we are talking about mission in our
own community, in our own city. Well, this, as you see, is simply a kind of introductory sketch to lay out the picture as I see it at the moment. Let's stop there and please come in with your comments, your questions, and anything that you would like to say that would shape what's to follow because although I have of course a lot of material prepared here, I would like to make it as useful to you as possible
in relation to your own interests and needs. For the benefit of Dr. Bauer, let me say that I just tried to do a kind of a quick indication of some of the controversial issues that are being debated these days in the field of the theology of mission and a very quick bird's-eye look at the sort of historical background of the debate, where we are in terms of history now. Today, I want to take the issue
of the authority of the Christian mission because I think this is a starting point that really enables us to penetrate down to the basic questions. In the kind of historical context that I sketched yesterday, the context of an interlocking and at the same time plural and in some sense centrifugally moving world society where we have these four phenomena that I spoke of, political, economic, and technical interlocking, enormous mixtures of population, two confident missionary faiths challenging mankind
in almost every part of the globe, namely Islam and Marxism, and Christianity as a universally dispersed minority no longer primarily identified with the North Atlantic world. If you take these four, as it seems to me, crucial elements in the world's situation, in this kind of context, how do we conceive the authority of the Christian mission? If you read the missionary literature, of roughly speaking anything up to the First World War, up to the 1914 World War,
even the sophisticated missionary thinking as it was for that time that you find in the 1910 World Missionary Conference, you are immediately aware of the background of confidence that whether it be long or short, the other great world religions are on the way out, that they cannot possibly have any future, that progress, the movement, the wave of history is the wave on which we ride as representatives of Western Christian civilization, that the Christian message is the
essential dynamic and core of that movement, which is the wave of history, that the Western world represents the vanguard of the human march, and the church is the guide and inspirer of that vanguard, and that there cannot be any significant future except as an attenuated survival for the other great religions, Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, animism, Shintoism, and so forth. Now of course, I don't say that these attitudes have entirely disappeared, they have not. When you read that
you're immediately aware of the difference in tone. But on the other hand, the persistence into our own time of phrases like backward peoples, primitive religions, undeveloped societies, phrases like that which are still part of our vocabulary remind us of the fact that the mentality of that era still survives. The almost totally uncritical enthusiasm with which missions climbed onto the development bandwagon in the 1960s is another illustration of the same thing. I mean, I was a serving
missionary in those days and if you went round on deputation work in the 1960s, it wasn't any good telling people that some people had been converted and some people had been baptized and the church had increased. That was not interesting news if you could show that you had introduced a new kind of disease-resistant chickens or a new system of sanitation or something. That was development, that was news, that was the Christian mission doing its real
stuff. Well, we've got over that now too I think, but the sort of assumption that missions have their justification because they contribute to development itself indicates that that old attitude is by no means dead because development in that context means getting the rest of the world to follow the way the Western world has gone. It means replacing the traditional values of Indian civilization with the values of Western civilization. That's what development means. Now I think we're
getting out of that too, but nevertheless these attitudes still persist and of course there is a sinister side to it as well. You won't misunderstand me when I say that there are a lot of people in India for instance who will look at any foreign missionary whether he's American or British or German or whatever he is and ask is this man an agent of the CIA. This is the sinister side of the picture, but with the
top of our minds at any rate we all recognize that that is a hangover from the past. To recap in a way what I said yesterday, first of all there is the fact that Western culture has by and large repudiated the Christian roots on which it was nourished. The assumptions, the axioms, the models, the paradigms by which modern Western man does his thinking are not those derived from the Christian faith. They are derived from elsewhere. Western
man tries to accommodate the Christian faith. He tries to see how much of Jesus he can still salvage out of a modern historical critical worldview and so forth. He tries to see how much of a Christian interpretation of history he can still salvage, but it's a salvage operation. Basically the dynamics of modern Western society don't derive from the Bible. They derive from other views of the world. Basically the West has repudiated the Christian tradition and secondly
the rest of the world has repudiated the leadership of the West. It isn't so long ago that Indian nationalist leaders, I'm talking now about the later years of the 19th century, the people who founded the Indian National Congress accepted the moral leadership of the West. They accepted the moral excellency of the West. They wanted India to catch up with the West in terms of the moral leadership of the West. Now that is a thing of the
past. The rest of the world has repudiated the moral leadership of the West. And then thirdly, the Christian church, the bearer of the gospel, is no longer primarily a Western society even though it has enormous cultural links with the West. If you had the privilege that I had of participating in the assembly at Nairobi in 1975, one cannot participate in a meeting like that sitting day after day in that great Kenyatta conference centre with 2,500
representatives of the worldwide church without recognizing that the Western world, the North Atlantic world, is now certainly an important but in no sense the dominant element in the worldwide Christian family. Whenever I stand up and preach now in a pulpit anywhere, I never do so without trying to have in my mind a picture of that assembly so that what I say may be authentically what I would be willing to say in that assembly where a man
like Borovoy from Leningrad or Bonino from Buenos Aires or Butelezi from South Africa with those enormously different cultural and political situations would be able to say, yes, this is the gospel which we all preach. So these are the three points that the Western world has repudiated the Christian roots from which it sprang, that the rest of the world has repudiated the moral leadership of the West and that the church is no longer primarily or mainly a
Western society. So in this situation, what is the authority of our message? We cannot use the language that the missionaries of 50 years ago used. We cannot assume that there is a sort of authority that derives from the sort of world leadership of the church. As I mentioned to you yesterday, in my young days as a missionary, I used to do quite a lot of street preaching and our home in those days was the city of
Kanchipuram, a very famous Hindu sacred place, and it was a quite frequent experience to be challenged in the streets by a very highly educated Brahmin, a man of wide education, culture and spiritual experience. Who would put the question, what right do you have to come and talk to us? What is your right to come and speak here? What right have you to come and talk to us who have a profoundly significant religious tradition going back
2,000 years before the time that you were still savages in your little island off the west coast of Europe? And of course the same kind of question comes in in every different context. Why don't you give up your proselytizing? Why don't you join with all of those who are seeking to find the truth after which all religions are striving? Why don't you join with all men of goodwill in the battle against poverty and injustice and exploitation?
Isn't your whole enterprise an offense against human unity? Look at what's going on in Northern Ireland. Look at what's going on in Lebanon. Isn't this whole enterprise of Christian proselytization an offense against human unity? And of course one has the same kind of questions raised within our own Western culture, although perhaps in slightly different accents. So the question by what authority is a question that you cannot evade. Let's begin by remembering that that question was put
to Jesus. Would you look at Mark 11? You remember the famous question, Mark 11:27. He was walking in the temple and the chief priests and scribes and elders came to him and said, by what authority are you doing these things? Who gave you this authority to do them? Mark 11:27. Jesus said to them, I will ask you a question. Answer me and I will tell you by what authority I do these things. Was the
baptism of John from heaven or from men? Answer me. They argued with one another. If we say from heaven, he will say, why did you not believe him? If we say from men, they were afraid of the people. So they answered Jesus, we do not know. And Jesus said, neither do I tell you by what authority I do these things. By what authority do you do these things? What does that question mean? What are they asking
for? They're asking, are they not, for something which would establish Jesus' connection with an authority that they already recognise, the authority of Moses, of the law, of the scriptures. They are seeking to establish the dependence of Jesus or the lack of dependence upon an authority which they already recognise. Jesus answers it by a counter question to ask them about the authority of John, John's baptism. Now, come back later to this because the baptism of John is
the beginning of the gospel and we cannot too often go back to look at the fundamental place of John's baptism in our whole understanding of the gospel. But leave that aside for the moment. He simply comes back and puts the question to them whether they are capable of recognising authority. The scribes and the Pharisees spoke from the authorities. They could quote scripture for all they had to say. They are not as the scribes. In other words,
Jesus confronts them with the necessity of recognising a new authority which means taking that life and death leap by which you commit yourself to an authority which is not validated by resting upon some other authority. And of course, the same issue arises for the disciples themselves. Exactly the same question is put to the disciples in Acts 4, one of the early healing miracles when the disciples are summoned to explain what they are doing. In Acts 4,
verse 5, the rulers and elders and scribes were gathered in Jerusalem and when they had set the apostles in the midst, they inquired by what power or by what name did you do this? Then Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, said, Rulers of the people and elders, if we are being examined today concerning a good deed done to a cripple by what means this man has been healed, be it known to you all and to the
people of Jerusalem that by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead, by him this man is standing whole before you. Again, there is simply the name of Jesus. They cannot satisfy the authorities by quoting an authority that they already know. They are confronted with a new authority, the name of Jesus, which therefore requires a fresh decision, not just an act of reasoning from an authority that we already
recognize. It is a fresh decision. Jesus presents himself as an ultimate authority, not to be validated by reference to some other authority. Now, of course, the next question that immediately arises is who is Jesus? And that is the fundamental question of theology. We come in tomorrow's lecture to the way in which that answer in the name of Jesus had to be developed until it took the form in the name of the Father, the Son, and the
Spirit, because the answering of the question, who is Jesus, could only be done in that way. But for the moment, leave that aside. The question by what authority is answered with the single name, Jesus. Jesus is the authority, and that means that you are confronted with an existential decision. You are confronted with a fresh authority which does not rest on some other authority but demands the decision of faith, yes or no. And I think this is
the basic form of the answer that we have to give. Do you want a pencil? I'm rather well provided here. This dictates the basic form of the answer that we have to give to the same question which is put to us. I spoke about the kind of questions asked of a street preacher in an Indian city. Let me begin this time the other way round, look at the questions that are put to us from within our
own culture. I am quite familiar with the astonishment that is often expressed when I have been talking to somebody in a railway carriage or in some casual meeting, and we've had half an hour's talk, and then the man says, what are you? What do you do? And I say, I'm a missionary. And the man looks at me and apparently same person is a missionary. What on earth are you doing? How can it be possible? We have
to face the question within our own culture, and the questions that are raised are always questions which try to validate the missionary call by reference to something else. We have to try to show, you see, that missions are useful in some way, that they promote development or they promote human friendship or they possibly encourage world travel, but at any rate that they can be, as it were, validated on some other ground. But we have to relentlessly
insist that in the last analysis the only answer is in the name of Jesus, that we are based upon an ultimate decision of authority. And we therefore have to press the counter questions that are put to us in order to bring out the assumptions that lie behind them. If you take the kind of questions that I referred to a few moments ago, why don't you give up your proselytising and work together with the adherents of all
the religions towards some kind of real human unity? Why don't you work together through mutual dialogue to combine the best insights of all the religions so that we may come together to the truth? Well, we'll have to talk about that question in a lot more detail when we come to look at the whole inter-religious issue, but here one simply puts the counter question. What makes you think that religion is an avenue to truth? How could
you answer the charge of a Marxist that religion is simply a whole tissue of illusion based upon class, on the class struggle? How can imagine that combining together all the religions is going to bring you to the truth? It might bring you exactly to that which is false. Or if you say that there is something common among all the religions, for example, the mystical experience, what makes you think that that is the avenue to truth? May
it not be simply an avenue of escape from reality? Or if you say we all believe in some kind of a god, well, even if you accept that, which is doubtful, there are the most enormously powerful arguments that can be brought to bear against any kind of monotheistic belief. What makes you think that combining together all these religions is going to bring you to the truth? You have to press the question back. In other words, what
is your authority? Or again, if you take the argument that you should be concerned not with propagating your particular religion, but with solving the problems of poverty and injustice and exploitation, again, you have to press the question back. What are the grounds? What are the basic principles on which human society can be ordered so that liberty and justice and the rule of law are in a proper balance with each other? What makes you think that you
have a clue to the solution of that problem? Or if you take the question, why don't you combine with all people of goodwill in order to bring about human unity instead of insisting on propagating your own particular belief? Here we have one of the most familiar of human illusions, don't we? We all agree that human unity is desirable, but the question always is, human unity around what centre? There is a brilliant article by Andre Dumas in
one of the recent issues of the World Council of Churches study encounter where he demonstrates, I think, that every programme for human unity which does not specify a centre is always a programme for human unity around myself. It is my programme for human unity. But you will easily recognise it as such. I will not. Let us put it in political terms. Both Washington and Moscow are very liberal in the use of the word peace and unity
to define their foreign policies. But when we read a speech about peace and unity, we have to look at the dateline at the top of the press release to know what kind of peace and what kind of unity we are talking about. Your programme for unity is what I call empire building. In fact, it would be a good definition of the word imperialism to say that imperialism is the name we give to other people's programmes for
human unity. That is what imperialism is. There is no escape from the question unity around what centre? Your programme for unity looks to me as a programme for oppression, for domination. My programme for unity looks the same to you. The question unity around what centre is the inescapable question? And of course the Christian commitment is simply that Jesus is the given centre, God-given centre around whom alone the unity of mankind is possible. So that we
have to press the questions back and insist that it is not my business to validate the claim of Jesus by showing that it can be brought under some other claim that others will recognise. It is not my business to validate the authority of the Christian mission by saying that it supports development or unity or inter-religious understanding or some other good thing, even if these be true. I have simply to confess that I act and speak
in the name of Jesus because I know of no authority beyond that by which that could be validated. In other words, we're talking about an ultimate commitment of faith and I don't think you can get into the business of a theology of mission without recognising that we are talking about an commitment of faith and I mean ultimate in the full sense of the word, that beyond which there is nothing. Now again, of course, this raises a
whole lot of questions that we have to discuss later. Is there no continuity between men's other commitments and this commitment? Is this a sort of total break which simply cancels everything else that went before it and replaces it? There is not a simple answer to that question. Again, we will have to discuss it in some detail when we come to the whole question of inter-religion, but just very briefly I would want to say this is
famous continuity and discontinuity debate which dominated missionary discussion during the period following the publication of Kramer's great book. Now have I used a word? Forgive me if I used a word that you didn't know. Commitment. Okay, okay. Do stop me if I use a word that, please, because it's healthy for me. All theologians tend to use words that they don't understand. The great debate between continuity and discontinuity, you remember that the famous book of Kramer, Christian
Message in a Non-Christian World, spoke of a radical discontinuity between the gospel and all other religions and ideologies and faiths. And I would want to say that there is both a continuity and a discontinuity, but the sense in which that is so is something that we must discuss when we come to the inter-religious question. But here I simply make the point that the question of a theology of mission faces us with the question of
an ultimate decision, an ultimate commitment. If you are asked by what authority, you can in the end only answer, in the name of Jesus. And then the question comes, who is Jesus? And there is where theology really begins. I've been talking about the kind of questions that arise from within our own Western culture, but of course there is also the whole range of questions that arises from outside of our culture, the kind of questions that are
put by a Hindu or a Buddhist or a Muslim to the Christian evangelist. How am I to meet those questions? Shall I try to show that the gospel is the answer to the need of the Hindu or the Muslim? But my Muslim questioner or my Hindu questioner in the streets of Kanchipuram will not be able to see that that is so, because his understanding of his needs is already necessarily shaped by the experience that he has
had apart from Jesus. It's his understanding of his need is developed apart from a knowledge of the gospel, and therefore the authority of the gospel cannot be rested upon the fact that it meets his need. If one may take a very, very simple example, many enthusiastic evangelists who think that there are very, very short cuts in this matter, I've heard this being done, will go out into the streets, I have heard this being done, will go
out into the streets of an Indian city with a loud haila and say, hopefully in the language of the community, God so loved the world that he sent his only begotten son that whoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life. But everlasting life is exactly what a Hindu is trying to escape from. The whole of Hinduism is a quest to be delivered from everlasting life, to be delivered from the endless round of samsara.
So the invitation is not helpful. Or if you take the famous text in 1st Timothy 1:15, Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners, which I've also heard delivered over a loud haila in an evangelistic meeting in an Indian street. But what do those words mean? You translate the words, Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners into the Tamil language, parvigalirachika, to save sinners. But the whole meaning of what, that text has
its meaning for us because of our experience in Christ. My predecessor as a missionary in Kanchipuram used to say that to an ordinary Hindu, the meaning of those Tamil words in his Tamil Bible, parvigalirachika, to save sinners, actually means Jesus Christ came into the world to provide free boarding lodging for dropouts. And in a book that I wrote called Sin and Salvation, I quoted this in the book of the Bible course, and an American missionary friend
of mine was teaching a class in a Bible seminary, a class of evangelists, and was using this book as a textbook. And the students said to him, sir, this man Newbegin doesn't know what he's talking about. This is not true. So my friend said, well, in that case, you please go out into the streets and in the next 24 hours, each one of you get hold of a Hindu who has had no contact with Christians at
all and read that text to him and find out from him what he thinks it means. And the next day, they all came back and said, it's perfectly true. That's what they think it does mean. They had lived so much within a Christian milieu that the meaning of those words was what it comes to mean to us who have had the experience in Christ. But to one who has not had that experience at all, it could
only mean that. Jesus Christ came to provide free boarding lodging for dropouts. And when we look at our vast apparatus of orphanages and boarding schools and things, they think they understand exactly what the text means. But it's apparently what we do. The point is that you cannot evade this problem of discontinuity. There is no smooth continuity by which you can build the authority of your message upon the experience that is there already apart from Christ. The
experience of converts from many different faiths shows that Jesus makes an impact on the minds and hearts of people, which is often quite different from what the missionary intends or expects. There's a very interesting passage in the life of C.F. Andrews, one of the greatest missionaries of this century. And Andrews, who went out to India with the typical message of an evangelistic missionary of the first decade of this century, preaching the evangelical message of conversion,
very quickly discovered that what, in fact, was being heard was something quite different. That, in fact, even among those who did accept the message and became Christians, Jesus was making his own impact on them in a way which was quite different from the one that the missionary expected. He came to them with his own sovereign authority, and their own experience was in no sense a reproduction of what the missionary had, so to say, programmed for them.
So the preliminary conclusion of this inquiry, what is the authority, is that it is futile to rest the authority of the Christian mission on anything other than Jesus himself. This, in very simple and crude terms, is what I'm trying to say. If you are asked, what is the authority? What right do you have to be missionaries? And let's face it, I don't know how it is in these United States, but I know that in Britain all
the best theologians, not all the best theologians, but a lot of the best theologians, best in inverted commas, will tell you that missions are simply a hangover from the colonial period, which had better be forgotten. That, in fact, they are just a misunderstanding. Professor John Macquarie, Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity in the University of Oxford, one of the most prestigious theological chairs in Britain, said in a recent book that the whole idea of sending missionaries to
preach Christianity to the Hindus and Muslims is just a hangover of the colonial period. So I don't know whether this is so in the United States, but it's certainly so in Britain. And when the question is put, there is, I think, only one answer, and that is, in the name of Jesus. Jesus, the human name of a man about whom people don't know until you tell them. I'm putting that in a very crude sense. You have
to tell people the name of Jesus, because they're not born with the knowledge of it. Now, of course, that answer has to be enormously developed, as I say. You can't stop there, because the question comes back, who is Jesus? And out of that, the whole, first of all, the whole Trinitarian doctrine has to develop. But a very first expansion of that would be to say that the missionary goes, and please, let's remember that although my background
is that of a foreign missionary working in another culture, I believe that what I'm saying is applicable to our total situation. And I hope, as we go on to try to illustrate what I'm saying from situations within our own culture, as well as from situations such as those I've referred to in India. A missionary goes into the situation as the bearer of a confession. I believe that Jesus is Lord. He goes as the bearer of a
confession. He says, I believe. In other words, it is a personal commitment. The missionary has no pretense to occupy a stance which is above all personal commitments. One of the things that I find perplexing about so much current writing on the inter-religious question is the apparent assumption of the writers that there is a standpoint from which one can kind of survey all the phenomena of religion, that you can look at Christianity and Hinduism and Judaism
and Islam and everything else as though you yourself were occupying a sort of privileged position of objectivity in which you are just able to survey everything. Now this is a pure illusion. I've been very much engaged in controversy in Birmingham over the famous Birmingham Syllabus, which is a syllabus for religious instruction, which advocates the teaching of all religions equally on a basis of pure objectivity, in order that the children may not be brainwashed into accepting any
particular religion, such as Christianity, for example, but should be enabled to adopt a free, critical, objective understanding of them all. Now, of course, the one thing that is not offered for critical examination is the ideological standpoint of the author of that syllabus. He is not aware of the fact that he thinks that it is just how things are, but to anyone who looks at it from outside, he is obviously adopting the ideological standpoint of a, how
shall we say, a bourgeois, middle-class, slightly tired, post-Christian culture, which it is very easy to examine, but he is unaware of it. He thinks that the standpoint that he occupies is, so to say, above all standpoints. Now, I think a Christian missionary is one who is aware of the fact that he is not in that position. If I may put it in a very crude way, it seems to me a very simple point, but
a very important point, which many people have not grasped, that when the Good Lord constructed this universe, he did not construct it with a spectator's gallery provided. In other words, that all of us are on the ground floor, Hindus, Muslims, Marxists, Christians, whatever we are. There are no privileged positions. We are witnesses. We are people who say, I believe. In other words, we are committing ourselves to a faith about which it is possible to doubt, about which it is possible that I might be wrong.